Communication systems based on various communication protocols are commonly employed for enabling communication between devices. Such protocols often employ a data link or bus such as a serial peripheral interface (SPI) or a synchronous serial interface (SSI) for communicatively linking devices together. A typical SPI or SSI bus may include a multi-wire interface for communicating signals between a master device and one or more slave devices. For example, a multi-wire interface may include wires designated for communicating a start/stop signal, a chip/slave select signal, a data signal, a clock signal, etc. In recent years, single-wire interfaces have been developed for providing communication between a single master device and a single slave device.
As a general matter, a single-wire interface may sometimes be preferred over a multi-wire interface for purposes such as cost and/or performance. For instance, the additional wires in a multi-wire interface require more components (e.g., pins, connectors, etc.), which add cost and may increase electrical noise and interference. On the other hand, communicating with multiple slave devices via a single-wire interface may require additional interfaces, which typically require additional parts such as pins and/or pads for enabling communication with the master device. As a result, overall complexity and/or cost may increase, e.g., due to increase die size, pin count, etc. In addition, a single-wire interface generally requires a timer such as an over-sampling clock for synchronizing data transmissions via a common clock signal, which may entail complex logic to recover data. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide an improved interface that overcomes the drawbacks associated with the aforementioned interfaces.